The 3 Benefits of Painful Meetings

Many leaders operate on the delusion that people acting happy around them means everything is good. Don’t they realize that their employees’ careers ride on being liked by their boss? Most people will go out of their way to avoid conflict in front of their boss.

The same is true of meetings. The point of bringing people together for meetings is to collaborate. Collaborate means to work together to create something. How can you… Read the full article >

3 Optical Illusions That Are Hurting Your Team

Many leaders are seeing things that aren’t there. Many teams are teams in name only, and their executives are under illusions which prevent them from acting in sync, as one, to win.

Team Illusion #1: Team performance is cumulative.

I have had the same surprising conversation repeatedly through the years with executives.

I ask, “Do you have a high-performing team?” The executive says, “Yes.” I reply, “How do you know?” They invariably say, “Well, I have… Read the full article >

3 Ways to Create a Tight Team

Google did a multi-year study of the highest-performing teams at their company, hoping to understand what makes them so efficient. The results told them a simple answer: community. The highest-performing teams were ones where individuals felt comfortable being themselves. The more a team feels like a supportive community, the higher its productivity is. Often, the most high-performing teams feel like a family, and that makes an incredible difference in their results.

1. Learn what everyone’s doing.… Read the full article >

5 Counterintuitive Techniques to Transform Your Team Meetings

Unfortunately, many leaders still use old and outdated meeting-management techniques that fail to create effective meetings. Even with a solid agenda and strong task leadership, one huge problem continues to get in the way: people!

Distractions, groupthink, lack of comfort with conflict, overly quiet or talkative people, and other aspects of human nature get in the way of making team meetings productive.

Here are 5 techniques that tap into people’s best sides. They get team members to be enthusiastic… Read the full article >

Move Your Team from Functional to Distinction

Functional teams – or those with mediocre leaders – are generally focused on performing a set of carefully proscribed functions and getting compensated for doing so. Teams of distinction are those that are energized to move forward by aspirational goals and have a determination to prevail over all expectations. How can a team make the leap from the former to latter?

Ask your team this one question:

“What one thing can we do, that if… Read the full article >

Why Is the Grass Always Greener on the Other Side? Two Simple Strategies to Boost Retention in 2019

A complaint we hear when the economy is booming is, “We attract great people. But our best and brightest become disillusioned and eventually go off in search of other opportunities.” All too often, leaders don’t leverage the talent they have in their teams. These teams operate at a deficit—equal to or less than the sum of its parts. As a result, the best people leave.
Here are… Read the full article >

Team Hygiene Habits

Teams of distinction dedicate time for hygiene. Hygiene literally means practices conducive to maintaining health and preventing disease. This applies to teams just as it does to people.

Without regular time set aside for the team to work through issues, the team gets toxic. The issues and problems build up. The team energy turns negative. And the team gets derailed.

Teams must schedule in time regularly to hash out the differences, and plan for success. Here are my recommendation for good team hygiene and staying in top team shape:

Daily:  Appreciate.  People are great at finding problems but its… Read the full article >